This is a little linseed growing on one of our non-slip rugs.Â How did that happen, you ask?Â Is our house that damp?Â Well, no.Â It’s rather more interesting than that!

You see, when Sid had his corn surgery, we had to make him a little walkway over the patio stones once his bandage came off, because the ground was too hard for him to walk on comfortably.Â It was an emergency, so I grabbed a number of non-slip rugs we had handy and laid those down, and it was a huge success. We really didn’t expect to be able to use them in the house ever again, but as Sid got better and we had time to look around, we found a slightly less soft but considerably tidier option: a series of outdoor runners made from what they laughingly describe as ‘outdoor grass’.

At about that time, I fell ill with this wretched virus. It’s been two weeks now and while I managed to brush the dirt from most of those rugs and wash them before I was incapacitated*, one got left draped over one of the garden chairs outside, and forgotten.

In the meantime, the little birds have been coming regularly for their seed and – being right messy little tykes – scattering it everywhere.Â Some of the seed got into the fibres of the rug.

It rained.Â It sunned.Â And theÂ little seeds grew – just like a handful of cress on damp kitchen paper, and with about as much long-term future to look forward to.

Several of them sprouted, but I didn’t notice until I’d already brushed the heads off most of them when I went to get the last rug in this morning.Â That one up there is the only one left.

And now that’s gone too, because the rug is in the washing machine!

Farewell little flax sprout. It was a damn good try, and it made me smile, so you have become today’s post for the 100 Days of Happiness.

* They washed beautifully, by the way, and look almost as good as new.

We were in town the other day, and as on so many other occasions, we stood, indecisively, and wondered if there was anything else we had to do before we could give up and go home.

I thought for a minute.

‘Wilkinsons!’ I said. ‘I need more mealworms!’*

We looked up the street towards that distant emporium of wonders.

Me: ‘Do you want to come with me, or take this stuff to the car and meet me in Waitrose?’

OH: ‘I don’t mind coming with you. Providing you’re not in there for ages, that is?’

I assured him I only wanted mealworms, so off we set. When we arrived, OH looked a little disconsolately at the big glass doors and the heaving masses inside them, and then at a metal bench on the pavement outside. It was damp, and looked distinctly greasy.

‘If it was cleaner – and if it was warmer – I’d sit out here and wait for you’, he said.

He trailed behind me as I went inside. I located the mealworms fairly quickly, but then, it has to be said, I got a bit caught up in all the random stuff they have in there: strange, bizarre stuff, a lot of it. Lurid place mats, and doorstops shaped like foxes and huge wooden ampersands. I mean, who buys all this crap, I wondered, even as I secretly thought some of it looked kind of fun…

OH kept disappearing and reappearing. He looked tired and dispirited. I spotted a bench, and pointed to it: a clean one, inside the shop on the far side of the tills, no doubt put there for weary husbands to prevent them dragging their wives off home without spending any money. His face lit up and off he went, sinking onto it gratefully to wait for me.

When I had finished marvelling at all the stuff (and very nearly buying some of it), I took my mealworms to the till, paid for them, and walked up to OH on his bench. I thought I’d cheer him up a bit.

‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’ I asked, quietly, bending down to him solicitously. ‘Would you like to come home with me?’

A couple of people sneaked sideways glances, but I ignored them.

OH looked up at me, suspicious but hopeful. ‘You do look nice,’ he said. ‘I dunno. Got any bourbons?’

‘No’, I said.

‘Not coming with you if you haven’t got any bourbons,’ he said, sulkily.

‘OK, suit yourself’, I said, and walked off.

I was almost out of the door before he caught up with me.

‘I thought you wanted bourbons!’ I asked, a touch frostily as we stepped out into the equally frosty air.

He grinned. ‘I thought I might persuade you to buy some!’

I laughed, and we proceeded the road, happy in the knowledge that some very confused people were probably watching us from Wilkinsons, convinced I’d picked up a strange, homeless person and walked off with him.

We had turned the corner towards the shopping centre and car park, when OH clutched at me.

‘Look at that bus!’ he said

I looked. It was going to Southend. ‘Yes?’ I asked.

‘Southend via Manchester!’ he said. ‘Do they actually know where either of those places are? You might as well say ‘London via Leeds!’

‘That is rather strange’ I said, puzzled. I opened my mouth to speak, but he got there first.

‘Got any bourbons?’ he asked, hopefully.

‘I have no bourbons’. I replied. ‘Perhaps you should go back to Wilkinsons. There’s a nice bench there, inside, out of the cold’.

We giggled, and went to Waitrose and did our shopping, and we went home, and I cooked some dinner. We watched an old episode of Boston Legal, and when it had finished, OH turned to me and said:

‘I could do with a bourbon or two right now’.

I sighed.

‘Sorry’ I replied. ‘I still don’t have any bourbons’.

There was a pause.

‘Oh, well, never mind’, he said. ‘This chair’s a lot more comfortable than that bench, anyway’.

It’s lovely to be able to make each other laugh and play silly games over nothing, don’t you think? But I often wonder; are we really peculiar, or do other people do this kind of thing, too?

And if they did, would they admit it?

* Wilkinson’s have the cheapest mealworms in town. We have so many ravenous starlings here that we get through buckets of the things during the winter. If I put enough out, the other birds get a fighting chance to pick up one or two.

Now, I’m not entirely sure about this one. I had to look it up on Google, where I discovered that ‘NSFW’ means, in internet slang ‘Not Suitable for Work’.Â My first thought, however, was that it was a typo and should have said ‘NSEW’ as in ‘north, south, east and west’.

This photo rather cleverly encompasses (tee hee) both meanings, if I do say so myself.Â First you have the enormous unsuitability-for-the-workplace of a small but extremely comprehensive spirits and liqueurs bar, complete with sugar and spoon for your shot of Absinthe, but these bottles are indeed gathered from many far-flung places: Scotland, Italy, France, Jamaica and South America to name a few.